So I’m writing about the politics of contagion and 28 Weeks Later, which I saw after having encountered foucaultisdead’s viral reading of the film. The sensibility is, then, of a reading already gathered by FID’s.

28 Weeks Later illustrates a logic of viral containment that targets the host. It secures territory against people. This logic of containment can only understand people as clean or infected or Schrödingerly both. It is a security logic of war or emergency, not sickness, for the western nation-state. As such it is a logic wedded to clear relations of enmity. Viscerality of transmission aside, this makes the film hard to read as literal virus and plays strongly into its overtones of the war-on-Iraq-terror.

The set up of 28 weeks later is London, the infected zombie plague of the first film has died of starvation, the RAGE virus seems to have gone and NATO/US troops have begun, what is termed, reconstruction. British refugees have been brought from extraterritorial camps to a greenzone in central London. The greenzone is tightly circumscribed by military presence and the moat of the Thames. As each refugee is brought into the area they are scanned for disease. The camera dwells on the eyes as they are scanned, showing the absence of blood, the filmic and metafilmic visible mark of disease. But also the differently coloured irises of a boy child (Andy) - one blue, one hazel-brown - a genetic trait, we are told, that can be passed from parent to child. [Spoilers for 28 Weeks Later below.]

In this inheritance we encounter the key turn of the plot, all our flesh is not a like. Our heredity passes from flesh to flesh the conditions of contagion. Andy, like his mother, Alice, is immune to the symptoms, but not the mark, nor the transmission of the disease. He and his mother are asymptomatic carriers. She carries it into the greenzone, he carries it across the channel to the currently filming sequel. Together they frustrate the logic of territorial security. While the military want to treat the mother like any other infected, death and disposal, her exceptional status reopens the possibility of other relations than enmity for her husband, Don, and for the medical officer, Major Scarlet Ross. These open the twin alter-hopes of the film, kinship and treatment.

Don is a running man, running backwards and forwards from lone survival to family. The film’s prologue has him hiding out from the initial infected with his wife and others. When the infected inevitably hit the survival group’s farm house bolt hole, as foucaultisdead put it, it’s every-individual-for-themselves. In the first tipping point of the film Don separated from his wife by 3 metres and the infected pauses, turns, shuts the door and flees. As Don runs we see Alice in the window of the farm house suddenly dragged away by host hands. Don is the only one to escape. He survives the first outbreak till the infected die out and winds up as janitor in the fancy digs of the greenzone. When Andy and his sister Tammy, Don’s older child, are reunited with their dad he explains to them that there was nothing he could do, he saw the infected kill Alice. When Alice is brought in to the greenzone and Don is confronted by his kids j’accuse there is hope for family completeness (it would be nuclear) and guilt of abandonment. Dons runs, he finds Alice in quarantine, begs forgiveness, she says she loves him, they kiss, he is infected, enRAGEd and gouges her face to bloody mess. That’s the action, but the but the balancing of ambiguities flows through. The ambiguity of whether Don could have done more to save Alice counterweights the ambiguity of whether Alice knows she is contagious. The film purposefully does not call whether it is naive love, mutual one-two revenge or suicidal loving embrace of the virus. All it wants is the longing of touch, the permeability of all relations that are not just the organisation of atomic bodies in space. The contagion (con-tangere) of passion undoing the logic of territorial security.

Major Scarlet Ross is a doctor. The genetic heritage of the mother and later the boy, which makes them carriers rather than infected, holds the medical promissory note of a treatment, cure or inoculation. As she tells Doyle, the soldier with the heart of gold who would rather watch (from his lonely sniper post) Don putting his kids to bed than the couple in the room below having sex, “The boy is more important than anyone,” she tells him, “he has a genetic ability to remain unaffected by the virus” [paraphrased]. The boy holds secret within him the hope of an end to the emergency and a return to normality, management and administration, structural maintenance rather than warfare. But this is a major conceit of the film for this hope of management is a nostalgia for the now. The devastation of RAGE, the quickness and finality of its effect, is beyond any disease we know. It is the state-of-nature, barbarism, pure terror as disease. We live in a contagious world, but a contagious world of risks, care and treatments. Even in the space of current epidemics we talk of efficacy, monitoring and incentive:

…in a country like Botswana, which is our neighbouring country, has a very high HIV infection rate because it’s got diamond mines and miners traditionally work away from their families and use sex workers. What’s happened there was that there was a very low uptake on monitoring and assessment for people who are HIV positive; they said why bother, we don’t have access to the drugs. The mining companies working with the government in Botswana brought in antiretroviral drugs then there was an incentive for people to actually find out their status and of course the benefit is that once you’re on the antiretroviral drugs, it doesn’t happen immediately, they wait for your CD4 count to drop to a particular level, once you’re on the drugs you’re less infectious so you can break the cycle, you can break the transmission cycle from one person to another even if they’re not using condoms. This is a fabulous breakthrough and now people are actually going and getting tested, they know their status.

This is not to suggest that in the film we have a outdated politics of territory and the longing for a politics of care, while in life we have a politics of care and merely the threatened return of a politics of territory. But rather, as recent events have shown, we currently have the interoperation of care and territory, while the film holds out the promise of care as a possible utopian escape from territorial security.

The film plays and runs the futility of a benevolent logic of territorial security as the ridiculousness of trying in the dark, in chaotic city streets to shoot only enemies that wear no uniform. Territorial security can only raze the ground and start again in the sterile space after war. As FID points out the logic of the film is that the two spaces of infected and clean correlate to two clean, sterile economies. FID writes:

There is a moment in that film where the survivors are caught between two Clean economies: the infected monsters and the NATO troops. As I said in my earlier post, these two economies are both unsustainable: once the infected infect everybody, the entire population dies of hunger; meanwhile, the NATO force purues an all-or-nothing approach to the question of population and infection - either a completely clean, successful population or an infected, doomed, failed and abandoned one. In such a situation, caught between these two economies, the only option for the survivors is to create the space before them. The reality which these subjects must face is that there is no solution to the virus because any meaningful human existence is itself viral in character.

Either economy’s equilibrium point is its cessation, starvation or obseletion. FID puts in the middle the viral survivors, those that live between force and contagion.It is between these two economies, that because they always appear together can never clean - they are the same economy - that human existence actually appears. Something valourous appears for FID in this space between that recognises virulence of living. However:

…the viral view of society cannot become a system of its own; it remains forever in resistance to the forces of political transparency (whether those are neoliberal, communist, or whatever). So viral politics is not the politics of class liberation but, rather, individual survival. What I like about the representation of survivalist groups in the ‘28… Later’ series is that they are never utopian, they are always pragmatic responses to the threat of the infected. Instead of a utopian commune form, these are viral communes, which can be violently split apart into an every-individual-for-themselves situation within seconds of a member becoming infected. A crucial ‘rule’ of these survivalist groups is that, once an attack of the virus erupts, no one tries too hard to save the others, lest everyone becomes infected - a sort of viral take on the prisoner’s dilemma. Of course, one needs to figure out how the survivalism of these films can be transfered to the lives of those who, in contemporary Western society, don’t need to survive as such. So, again, we’re returned to the Baudrillard of Seduction and Forget Foucault: forget the liberation of desire, forget the liberation of the oppressed social class. The best you can do is, like a virus, slip through the dirty cracks of the condom-like logic of the postmodern world.

This is where I begin to lose the sense of this viral thread. Survivalism, contingently individual or clustered yet never structural, is already the contemporary logic of viral containtment for forces of political transparency. The condom-like logic of this postmodern world is a different mechanism to the border-fence mentality of territory. A difference of nationalism to administrative rationality, compatible but discrete.

The logic of care, the biopolitics of neoliberal dhealth, prefers adherence to regimes of cleanliness and tries to set in motion public stigma against those that resist, but it doesn’t require it. As can be seen in the quote from Christina Scott regarding HIV in Africa, the best strategies of treatment are the ones that work on the numbers without individual condom use. Individual survivalism is the condom-like logic of a politics of contagion rather than a viral politics. As Wendy Parmet puts it:

It is trite but true that in America we admire individual self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. Not only do we admire this “taking care of number 1” attitude, but public health has encouraged it. Over the last several decades, public health has emphasized the role that individuals can and should play in determining their own health. Indeed, every day of week, we are bombarded with messages about how we can do this or that to take care of ourselves. Sometimes the message extends to what we can do for our families. Seldom are we told what or how we can do for unnamed others. Even infectious disease policies perpetuate this myth of self-control. We are told to vaccinate our children to protect them. We are told to help ourselves by getting a flu shot. And the federal government provides us with information about how we should prepare to help ourselves and our family in the event of an influenza pandemic.

And it is not just individual interest that forms is taken up by this logic. Now there is very little left of a general category of virus or contagion. Unhealth is indexed, aetiologised and risk valued. It is very hard to have a politics of contagion, which would now seem to mean a programmatic response to epidemic. Rather structural strategies are continually taxonomised. Part of what characterises the contemporary interdependence of biomedicine and social organisation is, as Rabinow terms it, biosociality. Individual’s cluster around the categories of biomedicine to swap survival strategies, advocate for protection through research and law, and general form contingent interest groups. Only to be splintered and fractured by changes in medical classification. This has become part of the logic of public health provision with the proliferation of support group networks. As Agamben says: “In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity”. Although in this case the “can” should be emphasised. Myriad classifications of the basketcase variety, such as Borderline Personality and Conversion Disorder, are often more stigmatized than recognised. But this is cast as a problem of voice, of these sufferers needing to speak up and demand protection louder.

So I’m not sure what to make of this survivalism at the heart of FID’s viral politics, except FID doesn’t simply advocate survivalism. The point more strongly and radically seems to be a Bataille-esque refusal of the limit (in this case of contagion). An enjoyment of one’s enmeshment in the dirty vectors of disease. So that while one survives, one does not partake of the biopolitical individual as an atomic quantum of interest. Instead one touches with (contagion) others ceaselessly. One refuses not only the external borders of healthy and unhealthy, but the categories of contagion. Or at least that is what I am left holding.?